The Invention of Paris (38 page)

As you descend towards Rue des Poissonniers, passing the mosque on the corner of Rue Polonceau, you suddenly leave the Maghreb for Black
Africa: Rue Myrha with its shops selling clothes, hairpieces and cosmetics, the fabulous market in Rue Dejean that displays all the vegetables and fish of the Gulf of Guinea – Senegal captain, thiof, tilapia and shark. You are here on the uncertain border between the Goutte d'Or and something that is not really a quarter but keeps a prestigious name: Château-Rouge. This was a large domain, which would today be bordered by Rue Ramey, Rue Christiani, Rue des Poissoniers and Rue Doudeauville (on either side of Boulevard Barbès, just as today are Rue Myrha, Rue Poulet and Rue Doudeauville, built before the boulevard). It took its name from a fine dwelling of brick and stone built on the Chaussée de Clignancourt.
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In the 1840s, this was the site of what would become one of the largest public dance halls in the north of Paris – along with the Grand-Turc in La Chapelle – the Bal du Château-Rouge, also known as the Nouveau Tivoli. This is where, on 9 July 1847, over a thousand people gave the starting signal for the ‘banquets campaign', the long prologue to the revolution of February 1848.

The gap between the last foothills of the Goutte d'Or and the first slopes of Buttes-Chaumont serves as a passage for the trains of the Nord and Est lines, the canals, and the roads to Saint-Denis, Flanders and Germany; this was the triumphal return route for victorious kings of France, as well as the route of successive invasions: Blücher, Moltke, the Panzers of 1940. From below, you do not get the feeling of being in a hollow between two hills, but from a promontory of Buttes-Chaumont that you reach via the hairpin bends of Rue Georges-Lardennois, the contours are as visible as on a map: in the foreground a hillside of gardens and vineyards, then the valley, and behind this Montmartre, seen in profile as it cannot be from anywhere else.

There are two quarters in this plain, two major centres of industrial Paris, which has steadily extended towards the north and is still doing so: La Chapelle and La Villette. In the early twentieth century, when young Eugène Dabit, leaving school with his friends, reached the Marcadet bridge:

In this part the houses were darker, and so too were the men who entered them, all railwaymen. The factory sirens sounded, and suddenly the street
was full of workers. Some of them said ‘Hullo, kids' in a listless voice. There was something sad behind their look, a dejection in their attitude, and black cuts in their open hands . . . We started to run, we crossed Rue de la Chapelle where you came across the carts of market gardeners, cattle, flocks of sheep, and almost reached La Villette. We would see warehouses, the smoky lines of the Est railway; the rumbling of trains sounded like a muffled song.
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These two neighbouring quarters had different vocations. La Chapelle, organized around the railway, was a district of factories, dark and poor. La Villette, on the other hand, built around the Canal d'Ourcq and the Canal Saint-Denis, was a district of fairly thriving warehouses. The commune here had been particularly hostile to its annexation by Paris, which is understandable: ‘Thanks to its basin, the proximity of the stations, and the platforms of the Ceinture railway, La Villette is a major entrepot for wine, spirits, timber for building and carts, coal and charcoal, grain and flour, oil, glassware, cast-iron, etc. The docks here receive ten thousand ships each year, with a total load of around 1,100,000 tons, which places La Villette above Bordeaux.'
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This difference is still visible. La Chapelle is the end of the world, lost between the overhead Métro, the tracks of the Nord and Est railways, and the big warehouses on Boulevard Ney, along which young women hailing from Black Africa and Eastern Europe are busy attracting the attention of lorry drivers parked in the side streets. This is the most deprived part of Paris. Its main artery, Rue de la Chapelle (Rue Marx-Dormoy in its southern half) is dusty and rutted like any of the main roads in the old villages would have been – known here before the annexation as Grand-Rue, and elsewhere as Rue de Paris. But the very old church of Saint-Denis-de-la-Chapelle, whose façade bears one of the five Paris statues of Joan of Arc, seems to have been buried in a cape of sick concrete.
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One night on Rue Pajol, parallel to Rue de la Chapelle, André Breton was following a young woman: ‘I have since had the opportunity on several occasions to see again the dilapidated façade,
blackened by smoke, of the house on Rue Pajol . . . I have never known a more saddening frontage.' But like this woman who aroused Breton's astonishment,
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La Chapelle retains a hidden charm, around the Place de Torcy in the little Chinese quarter which is one of the oldest in Paris, in the welcoming cafés on Rue l'Olive, and in its covered market, whose clientele is a reflection of every continent on earth. The landscape beyond Rue Riquet, where the bridge crosses the tracks of the Est railway, is for me one of the most beautiful in Paris, with an immense all-round vista towards the Rue d'Aubervilliers and the disused building of the Pompes Funèbres Municipales, designed by a belated imitator of Ledoux, towards the repair shops for rolling stock of the Nord railway, whose semiconical nesting roofs suggest the scales of a prehistoric reptile.

‘It is via the beautiful and tragic Rue d'Aubervilliers that Debord and Wolman continue their northward progress.'
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Beautiful and tragic it still is, and when the setting sun lights up its frontages, it has the sparkle of a southern port – Algiers, Palermo or Alexandria. Further on, you enter La Villette by the Place du Maroc:

when I happened on it one Sunday afternoon, not only a Moroccan desert but also, and at the same time, a monument of colonial imperialism; topographic vision was entwined with allegorical meaning in the square, yet not for an instant did it lose its place in the heart of Belleville. But to awaken such a view is something ordinarily reserved for intoxicants. And in such cases, in fact, street names are like intoxicating substances that make our perceptions more stratified and richer in spaces.
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This is indeed the secret of the excitement that affects anyone who stumbles on Rue de Pali-Kao, the Passage du Roi d'Alger, or the Villa de Cronstadt.

In La Villette, there is nothing good to expect from the major centrifugal arteries, Avenue de Flandre and Avenue Jean-Jaurès. It is in the cross streets that past beauty can still be glimpsed: at the end of Rue Curial, in the
passages where garages, single-storey hotels, and metal-roofed workshops housing obscure activities press tightly together; in the almost African little shops of Rue de l'Ourcq, beneath the arches of the Ceinture railway. The heart of the quarter, the Bassin de La Villette, has indeed been improved by making use of what it was designed and built for in the port's heyday: the wheels of the lifting bridge on Rue de Crimée so often photographed by Atget, Brassaï and Doisneau; the warehouses; the Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe church that would be ugly anywhere else but here strikes just the right note, between the square, the fire station, and the waterfront market. Further along, the basin widens, dividing into two branches with different qualities. The Canal de l'Ourcq, which until the 1970s separated the cattle market and the abattoirs, today waters the Parc de la Villette in which footballers, tourists, cineastes and young mothers (veiled or not) spend Sundays harmoniously by the waterside. The Canal Saint-Denis, for its part, runs modestly out to the industrial wastelands of the north, hidden beneath Avenue Corentin-Cariou, Boulevard Macdonald, and the Périphérique, proletarian and a bit dirty, like the ‘
petits enfants d'Aubervilliers
' in the song by Prévert and Kosma.

The streets bordering the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont bear the names of heroes of national liberation struggles – Manin who was president of the short-lived republic of Venice in 1848, Botzaris who defended Missolonghi together with Byron, and Simon Bolivar. This has not prevented the quarter from today being a bourgeois island between La Villette and Belleville, with apartment blocks as substantial as those of Auteuil. But for many years this was a fearsome place for the working and dangerous classes. The Montfaucon gibbet was erected on the southwestern slope. In
The Last Day of a Condemned
, Victor Hugo – who, as we have seen, denounced the secret nighttime executions at the Barrière Saint-Jacques – exclaims: ‘Give us back Montfaucon, its caves of bones, its beams, its crooks, its chains, its rows of skeletons; give us back, in its permanence and power, that gigantic outhouse of the Paris executioner!' The famous ‘sixteen pillars' of Montfaucon were connected by three levels of transverse beams, so that on certain days you could see up to sixty individuals swinging there. The Montfaucon gibbet was in operation until the opening of the Saint-Louis hospital in the 1610s, after which the site was used for a
voirie
, i.e., a depository for the rubbish of the city, and a knacker's yard where old and sick horses ended up:

The place was a horrible one, on account of the dead flesh always on display. The bones rotted on the spot, heaped four or five feet high, until the time came for ploughing, when peasants came to look for fertilizer . . . The skins were removed every two or three days by the tanners of the Bièvre. But all around there were gut-dressers and workshops for chemical products, whose waste ran through the marshes and in the open towards Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles . . . Around the knacker's yard there were so many rats that, if the carcasses of the horses slaughtered during the day were left out in a corner of the premises, by the next morning they would be completely stripped.
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At the foot of Buttes-Chaumont, just above the refuse dump, there were two large holes in the hillside – the tunnel of the Ceinture railway, and the mouth of the chalk pit known as the Amérique quarry.
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From these vast excavations rose the smoke of gypsum kilns. The blocks were taken out of the kilns by
chaufourniers
(a street in the quarter bears their name, and there is also the Passage des Four-à-Chaux). The immense underground caverns, which remained relatively warm, sheltered a nighttime population of vagabonds. Rumour spread that a new court of miracles had arisen in the Amérique quarries. Regular expeditions by the police, and even the army, were organized to the ‘dark and gloomy caverns',
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to hunt out these unfortunate victims of the industrial revolution. In November 1867,
La Gazette des tribunaux
condemned the ‘still growing audacity of the prowlers who infest this zone of Paris, and seem to have chosen the said quarries as their headquarters'.
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And so ‘this famous vale of rubble constantly about to fall, the streams black with mud', as Balzac writes on the first page of
Old Goriot
, was built with its own subsoil, stones from the south and chalk from the north.
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It was the tunnels of these immense quarries that fuelled the imaginary underground of Paris, more developed than in any other capital, even bearing in mind the final chase in
The Third Man
and the battles of the Warsaw uprising. The first chapter was that of the Catacombes, which are the quarries of Montrouge and Montparnasse where remains from the Innocents cemetery were transferred. Nadar, who managed to photograph there in the 1860s using artificial light, described ‘those skeletons piled pell-mell and disintegrating . . . the ribs, vertebrae, sternums, wrist and ankle bones, metacarpals and metatarsals, etc. . . . the whole menu of bones . . . pressed together and heaped in more or less cubic masses below the crypts . . . and maintained in front by skulls chosen from the best preserved'.
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But the fantasy of an underground city was not just a matter of bones; there was always an element of threat attached to it. The metaphor of the social underground is developed in a marvellous chapter of
Les Misérables
(Volume V, book 2, ch. 2), ‘Ancient History of the Sewer':

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer secrets . . . All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends . . . The Saint-Barthelemys filters through there, drop by drop, between the paving stones. Great public assassinations, political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there . . . Beneath these vaults one hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes.

And, as an echo, during Bloody Week of 1871, the rumour spread that the Communards had taken refuge in the Catacombes and sewers and were preparing to blow up Paris.

The Métro never aroused such terror, and it was only in irony that Walter Benjamin took up the traditional image of an underground hell:

But another system of galleries runs underground through Paris: the Métro, where at dusk glowing red lights point the way into the underworld of names. Combat, Élysée, Georges V, Étienne Marcel, Solférino, Invalides, Vaugirard – they have thrown off the humiliating fetters of street or square, and here in the lightning-scored, whistle-resounding darkness are transformed into misshapen sewer gods, catacomb fairies. This labyrinth harbours in its interior not one but a dozen blind raging bulls, into whose jaws not one Theban virgin once a year but thousands of anaemic young dressmakers and drowsy clerks every morning must hurl themselves . . . Here each name dwells alone; hell is its demesne. Amer, Picon, Dubonnet are guardians of the threshold.
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